Follow your training plan and you can achieve your goals

Coach Jim talks about why following a training plan is the key to reaching your race goals:

There are four basic things to having a successful road race like a Marathon, Half, 15K, or whatever your favorite race distance.

I believe these principles apply to almost any athletic endeavor. They are Frequency, Overload, Specificity, and Injury Prevention. I have seen enhancements but essentially these are the vital few.

So when one wants to embark on training for a race, you need a training plan that has these four elements. Now, I am not talking about jogging every day for fun, or health or stress relief. What I am talking about is: you have made the decision to focus and train towards a specified goal and/or event like a marathon at 4:30 or better. (I'll talk about goal setting in a later post.)

I see many runners grab a plan off a website that consists only of the miles you need to run, or have a plan and don't follow it and wonder why they feel bad, or tired, or get injured and can't get back to plan. I too have been this very person, so you cannot hide; we know who you are and IT WAS ME.

Some folks use a plan with no specified pace. They follow the number of miles but each day they run a different pace. The only goal is the miles. Sometimes, runners will run these miles at 90% of race pace, and actually more often then one might think. These plans are generic. They usually do not specify a pace because they are trying to fit as many runner profiles as possible (sell lots of magazines or sell a bunch of plans).

Another example is someone that just runs the same mileage every day, bumping up his or her long runs each week by some arbitrary increase. These folks also will usually run all of these miles at near 90% of race pace because it is thought that by, say, increasing the long run by a mile per week, they will easily be able to run the 13.1 or 26.2 within just a few weeks --- AT THAT PACE! This approach is usually an injury waiting to happen.

And the one the sometimes is more problematic for a coach, is when a runner has a plan and either runs to fast, or chooses to run more miles one day (because they missed a day a.k.a. "catch up") or they just felt too good to stop or slow down, or fail to take a rest day. This tendency will simply delay the improvements in pulmonary and metabolic systems that are critical for success.

Worst case for this person is that their systems do NOT recover and need to take a long period off, get injured or shut down. There is a lot of data that defends the Easy, Hard, Easy overloading cycle. This data also includes the consequences of Hard, Hard, Hard, etc.... not a good thing.

I think a very wise Indian guide once said, "If you don't know where you are going, any route will take you there."

Problem is, to improve with purpose in almost any athletic event, it is required that you enable changes in your physiological and metabolic systems. You need to systematically improve your cardiovascular system (blood flow, volume, distribution), pulmonary system (Lung Capacity, O2 exchange rate), muscle composition (Recruiting type II muscles, building connective tissue) and improving the way your body utilizes its fuel sources (Blood Glucose, Liver Glucose, Muscle Triglycerides and development and use of mitochondria).

Your plan (and your adherence to plan), needs the right frequency (how many days per week, times per day), overload (easy, hard, easy hard and adequate rest), specificity (Pace or speed tuned to your goals) and a plan for injury prevention.

And let me just say this about injury prevention. It STARTS with having a good plan, which separates speed from distance. The plan allows for adequate recovery and progression (mileage or speed increases). And it includes having access to a good coach.

That injury prevention plan should be things like strength training, stretching and knowing when to take a day off. You should have way that you can listen to your body and make appropriate adjustments, like knowing your resting heart rate and taking a day off when it gets 10 beats higher.

So, when a runner that does have a plan, tuned for them, that chooses to run more miles or at a pace higher than specified, or other changes to the planned overload, frequency or particularly specificity, will only delay the planned improvements, best case, or completely "pooch" (as my coach puts it to me), their planned goals.

If you have made the time and investment to train properly, by following your plan, you give yourself the best possible environment for developing the right support systems that will take you to that lofty place of a successful race.